Mind games and memory: how do men and women compare?

There is little doubt that, in physical sports, men will tend to outperform women. Upper bodily strength plays a major role, ensuring that contests between respectively leading male and

female practitioners in tennis, boxing and rugby, for example, will inevitably end in favour of the men. However, should the same apply in mental sport, where physical strength is

irrelevant?

The late Tony Buzan, the inventor of Mind Maps, who sadly died prematurely of a heart attack in April 2019, maintained that there was virtually no difference between male and female

brainpower. This is a controversial area, and our former FIDÉ Vice President, Grandmaster Nigel Short MBE, once got into hot water by dipping his toe into this particular quicksand.

I co-founded the world memory championships with Tony in London 1991, in fact at the Athenaeum Club. For the first few years, white male competitors dominated proceedings, with particular

success bring achieved by Dominic O Brien, who won the world championship on no fewer than eight occasions. However, in the past five world memory championships there has been a startling

upheaval. The supreme grand champion in 2017 at Guangzhou was the Mongolian teenager Munkshur Narmandakh. A year later, even more sensationally, the new 2018 grand champion, crushing all the

men, was Wei Qinru, a 14 year old schoolgirl from China.

As an indication of the feats performed by memory champions, one of the most remarkable achievements has been to correctly memorise the order of a single shuffled pack of cards in about

twelve seconds. This has dropped dramatically from the two and a half minutes notched up by Dominic O Brien, when he first won the memory championship in 1991.

Chess might be considered the mental sport par excellence, so why is it, despite the undoubted brilliance of Judit Polgar, that no female player has come close to winning the world chess

championship? At the annual Gibraltar international a special effort is made by chief organiser Brian Callaghan OBE to encourage women’s chess. Nevertheless, although striking individual

victories are achieved by female grandmasters, the overall leading places tend to be taken by men.

So how do we interpret the dichotomy between memory sport and chess in terms of the female breakthrough? My initial explanation was that chess is an entrenched activity, with centuries of

historic and social male dominance. On the other hand, memory sport represents a relatively new type of mental combat, where there is no great tradition of male superiority. Given social

carte blanche and a level playing field, it therefore seems to me that a parallel female breakthrough will eventually occur with chess.

Here are the astounding medal positions from the past five World Memory Championships. Where a contestant was aged 20 or younger, I have so indicated:

Since 2017 there have been 11 female medalists against only four male, with all five gold medalists being female.

Professor Barry Buzan, Tony’s brother and co-inventor of Mind Maps, argues that although these figures are interesting, the sample is insufficiently large to draw far reaching statistical

conclusions. They are indeed remarkable and the phenomenon of teenage girls gradually coming to dominate the leading slots in the world memory championships deserves further investigation in

the context of male and female brainpower.

One of my heroines and role model par éminence is Dr Sue Whiting: musician, nuclear physicist, successful mother and five times women’s world memory champion. Given the efflorescence of

female memory talent, the separate female category has now been abolished (unlike chess and physical sports). However, Sue’s multi-tasking feat of accomplishments in parallel processing 

includes at least four headings which are quite beyond my capacity, in spite of my stratospheric score in O Level Physics.

On consideration, memory is perhaps much less useful for chess and related games than it is for bridge. Chess requires analysis and forward projection. Remembering past positions in your

game may even be positively detrimental, since you may become entangled in recollection of past winning positions which no longer exist. In chess you have to cope with the present and

future. The contrast with bridge is clear, where female players have been more successful and where the ability to memorise which cards have been used is essential.

This leads me to the thought that the female brain, if it is indeed stronger in memory than the male, might in fact be closer to nature, where we know that experiments with certain animals,

elephants, the octopus, homing pigeons and, most remarkably, chimpanzees, have demonstrated extraordinary powers of memory and speed of recollection.

Imagine primitive human society: the female has to remember the threats and dangers, perpetually aware of the sabre-toothed tiger lurking outside the cave, the infant awakening in distress

or the cave fire roaring out of control. Meanwhile the male of the species focuses on the challenge of wrestling with some primitive ancestor of noughts and crosses with a chum, or draws

pictures on the cave wall of the beasts he plans to hunt and kill, or knocks back a beaker or two of primeval pre-Sumerian Neanderthal proto-beer (invented by women, apparently).  Not much

actual memory power is involved in these male accomplishments, unless you really cannot remember what a mammoth looks like.

So, what we tend to call feminine intuition or animal instinct is in fact a higher form of meta-memory. The elephant finds the watering hole by learning from the matriarch, the Japanese

Macaque (aka Macaca fuscata or Nihonzaru) remembers how to wash its nuts from the example of its ancestral mother, Imo.

It seems to me that several conclusions may, pending further research, tentatively be drawn. The male and female brain may be virtually identical but the tendency is for the female human

brain to veer towards superior memory power, wrongly identified as intuition or instinct, and that this faculty brings human females closer to nature than human males. Memory appears to be

endemic throughout the animal kingdom, and by no means a unique attribute of Homo sapiens.

And one thing is clear; the inherited superior upper body strength of the male must exclude former men from transitioning into female sport. In spite of the testosterone or oestrogen counts

so beloved of our misguided sporting authorities as a yardstick for gender definition, new, more accurate and more holistically sensible criteria must be developed for deciding who can and

who cannot participate in female sport. For me this is axiomatic and I stand four-square with JK Rowling and Olympic Gold medalist Sharron Davies on this point, saying, metaphorically, with

Roman orator Cato the Elder: “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.”

This week’s game is a convincing win by Judit Polgar against, arguably, the greatest chess maestro of all time. Impressive though Judit’s achievements might be, it should be born in mind

that, in terms of wins and losses, Kasparov dominated the world’s best ever female player, by the lopsided score of twelve wins to one.

However, this is not so bad when you consider that, according to my research, only three players have ever had a plus score against Kasparov in adult face to face over the board games at

classical rather than rapid time limits. These three Alcides of the mind are Joel Lautier, Boris Gulko and Vladimir Kramnik, the last of whom memorably took the title from Kasparov in London

2000 in a match which I organised.

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